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Article Content Strategy What is an API, and What Do You Need To Know About Them? published on February 26, 2014 Every site we build begins with the NewfangledCMS. This sophisticated core of code is customized to meet each client’s specific needs, and it handles the vast majority of each website’s function. But most every site we build also includes at least one or two integrations with other software products or services that complement or augment the functionality found in the CMS. We connect the CMS with these third-party systems using Application Programming Interfaces, also called APIs. This article explains what an API is and also talks about what the developer needs in order to successfully complete an API integration. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design You Can Design a Better Store than Amazon by Christopher Butler on February 24, 2014 Amazon already has your customer in their store. Your customer is already browsing their aisles. Amazon will beat you, not because they have a better store than you, but because they have a bigger store than you. They sell enough things to already have your customer’s attention. It doesn’t matter if they came in to buy socks, if they’re at all likely to buy your thing, Amazon will have an easier time selling it to them because they are already there. So what do we do? Give up? Not just yet... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Calls to Action and Usability: How to Make CTAs That Work published on February 19, 2014 Having strong calls-to-action that are easy to notice, understand, and fill out is absolutely crucial for your site's conversion rate. However, don't fall into some common usability traps! Here's a simple usability guide to creating compelling, clear, concise CTAs. Read Now About
Article Fixing Bugs and the “Five Whys” of the Toyota Production System by Dave Mello on February 17, 2014 Tracking down and fixing bugs is hard. A non-developer might assume the opposite — if there’s an issue that the client/end user sees, the developer just needs to “go in and fix it.” The reality, though, is that the process of isolating the actual issue that needs correcting can often be rather winding — full of dead ends and false starts. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design How to Test a Website in Ten Seconds by Christopher Butler on February 11, 2014 A few weeks ago I wrote up a quick explanation of how to test a website in ten minutes. Quick and easy. But did you know that you can test a web page in ten seconds? Believe it. I started doing this after I read a page abandonment study by Jakob Nielsen, and have put together a method you can use right now... Read Now About
Article Email Marketing Why Marketing Automation Programs Fail, Part 2: Training and Guidance published on February 10, 2014 As a follow-up post to last week's look at why marketing automation implementations can fail, I wanted to highlight another common recipe for failure - having great robust marketing automation tools, but not knowing how to use them and not having the proper training and guidance to use the effectively. Read Now About
Article Casual Fridays: Content Marketing …since Always by Christopher Butler on February 7, 2014 Join us this week as we discuss the validity of content marketing. Will it live forever? Is it already dead? Find out here. Read Now About
Article How We Built the Merge Records Website to Handle All Those Digital Music Files published on February 5, 2014 Merge Records, an independent record label in Durham, NC, is the home of critically acclaimed and popular artists like Arcade Fire, Spoon, the Magnetic Fields, Neutral Milk Hotel, and many more. Theirs is also one of our latest website builds — one that presented a few interesting development challenges. While we’ve written at length about the overall Merge site build elsewhere, we thought it would be helpful to look specifically and in greater detail at the development side of what was a particularly complex project. Read Now About
Article Email Marketing Why Marketing Automation Programs Fail: it’s Not the Software, it’s Your Expectations published on February 3, 2014 I recently read that three out of five marketing automation implementations fail. Three out of five! That’s a 60% failure rate. That is alarming, but I don’t think that the reason that most of those fail is due to the software itself — there is some great MAT software on the market right now. The reason they usually fail is ultimately due to misguided expectations on the part of companies using that software. Here's a quick look at how to set your expectations realistically and set yourself up for success. Read Now About
Article How to Know if Your Content is Working by Tema Flanagan on January 29, 2014 We recently published a piece on our blog laying out the reasons you should produce content for your business’s site: SEO, lead development, and sale. Assuming you're in agreement, the question then becomes: how can you tell — concretely, on the basis of data — whether your content is actually serving those goals? Read Now About